Luigi

Luigi in one line: Luigi is a task orchestrator that manages the execution of related tasks.

What is Luigi?

Luigi is a Python package that helps developers schedule and monitor sets of tasks or batch jobs. Developers can specify how these tasks depend on each other using Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), ensuring that tasks are run and retried in the correct order.

Luigi has some overlap with Apache Airflow, but it’s much simpler. It consists of a single component, and in some ways you can think of it as a version of Make and Makefiles for distributed settings.

What problems does Luigi solve?

Machine learning solutions usually involve running pipelines of tasks or scripts. When there are only a few tasks, you can run them manually, or with a simpler tool like cron. But as the solution grows, managing these scripts turns into a headache – especially if one task fails in a way that causes a cascade of further failures.

With Luigi, developers can define all of these tasks in a single location, as well as how they depend on each other. Luigi can then “manage” these: running them on schedule, and rerunning the correct combinations if necessary. It also monitors taks, sends notifications of any problems, and tracks and logs experiments.